Ebola Czar Choice Shows How Obama Got Elected

The Ebola Czar shows that people want to believe in magic. They want to believe in magic people who work like genies granting wishes.

It is pretty clear that no one knows how to manage the PR and the real health risks involved in the African Ebola epidemic. So what do they do? They find someone who they want to believe will make all the hard decisions for them. If that person fails, the blame will be put on him. If he succeeds, Barack Obama will take the credit (though he will generously give thanks).

After fielding a question from CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta wondering about Klain’s knowledge of Ebola, [White House press secretary Josh] Earnest spent roughly two minutes beating around the bush explaining Klain’s bonafides, much of which had nothing to do with Ebola, and about his other experience, particularly while managing the stimulus package of 2009.

“What does Ron Klain know about Ebola?” questioned Acosta.

“Let’s talk about…let me re-state why this person…why the president believes it was important to add this person to his team,” Earnest began in his response. “The president wanted somebody who could serve in a coordinating function, to manage our implementation of our whole of government approach to this Ebola situation.”

“To more directly address your question, what we were looking for was not an Ebola expert, but rather an implementation expert, and that’s exactly what Ron Klain is,” Earnest said.

Watching the “explanation” of why Ron Klain was chosen as the Ebola czar, I couldn’t help but remember how Barack Obama won in 2008. People wanted to believe in a magic man who could solve all their problems, lower the sea level (which would actually merely kill a lot of fish), and create world peace without even trying.

People were desperate to believe they could have a savior.

And now we see that the Administration that harnessed that delusional impulse is just as much susceptible to its spell. Faced with the chaos of Ebola as a health and PR issue, they want a hero who can bail them out. As a result, they are willing to draft anyone who has a success record, no matter how unrelated it is to the medical emergency.

In my opinion, this superstitious urge is a measure of how unwieldy government has become. Big Government is so Big that it can’t even understand itself. When if fails to produce results, no one knows how to fix it or what to do to make it start working again. So they try to find some Strong Man or Expert who can impose order on the chaos in which they find themselves trapped.